Traditional methods of collecting, managing and providing real-time or near real-time relevant information have been enhanced through the use of the Internet and online research and information collection tools. One such set of tools is known as web analytics. Web analytics focus on a company's own website for collection of online information, particularly traffic data. Web analytics are limited because they only consider a subset of the relevant online universe, specifically the behavior of users of a given website. They do not discover other information about the users such as interests and opinions expressed in interactive systems. Behavioral analytics are another set of information collection and management tools that attempts to analyze the “click stream” of users and show advertisements based on this information. However, this method has many technical limitations since it tends to provide only a very limited picture of a user's overall interests. Also there is a lack of consolidation between a user's work and home PCs.
Online social media is a new source of valuable information on the Internet that may be harvested to generate information and other data about products or services, branding, competition, and industries. Online social media encompasses online media such as blogs and sub-blogs, online discussion forums, social networks, wiki sites such as Wikipedia, online reviews on e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com®, video sites such as YouTube®, micro-blogging services such as Twitter®, and so on. There are currently over 106 million blogs growing at a rate of 11% per year. There are several million forums with active contributions by more than 33% of Internet users. There are 483 million users of social networks worldwide growing at a rate of 47% annually. As a result, social media is becoming a crucial and rapidly growing source of consumer opinion. This information may allow users to quantify opinion on social media sites to gain useful insights into current consumer sentiment and trends relating to their products or services, brands, and/or technologies, and those of their competitors. Collecting and presenting this information can help users in a variety of ways such as, for example, target advertising revenues and expenditures, marketing, sales, customer service, brand management, product development, investor relations, and so on. Social networking sites are currently trying to leverage their own user profiles to target advertising based on their users' behavior and declared interests. However, most users today participate in several different online social media sites. Online content analytics are another set of information collection tools that attempts to analyze content in social media sites such as online forums, blogs, and so on. However, these techniques require a high degree of manual human intervention by analysts. Additionally, the reports generated by these analysts can be very expensive and can't be updated very frequently due to the necessity of human intervention in the data gathering and analysis process.